


here comes the sun (and i say, it's alright)

by gayreids



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Domestic Bliss, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Slice of Life, Tony Stark Has A Heart, slightly??? i think???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-25
Updated: 2019-02-25
Packaged: 2019-11-05 16:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17921999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gayreids/pseuds/gayreids
Summary: the cavity in his chest that looms too near to bucky's left shoulder seems to fill in a little, lessening the ache of everyday life until it becomes just bearable enough to breathe and feel like he isn't wasting air by doing it.





	here comes the sun (and i say, it's alright)

bucky still doesn’t feel human, even though it’s been more than a year since he’s been back from-

  
from.

  
he doesn’t let himself finish that sentence even in his own head, even though his mind is now technically his own and wakandan technology has taken over the territory that used to belong to hydra. his body expands and twists like a tree that’s grown too tall to know what else to do with itself. his legs warp until he’s somehow marched north east, until he’s in the french alps and a russian lab while still physically on american soil. he still feels cold, most days. maybe that’s left over from cryo but maybe that’s just who he is now. cold, but not unfeeling. despite what others may think of him, bucky hasn’t run into the old friend that was apathy in months now, since he crashed and rolled into the twenty first century in earnest even though years have passed since he first woke up in it.

  
tony is everywhere he goes. as bucky blows air through his gritted teeth (the air is _cold_ because what the hell else would it be?) he thinks of tony’s arm slung casually around him while he makes his first coffee of the day, giving him a kiss and a whispered _good morning_ , he thinks of tony’s touch on his arms, both metal and flesh, while he runs diagnostics on the guts and sinew of the vibranium that’s attached to him because bucky broke an egg between his fingers while he was making an omelette. he’d let tony believe that it was a malfunction when really, he’d just been looking at tony for a tad too long and imagining occupying the same space at the same time as him, as if they could mould into the same person and be _together_ for as long as their combined bodies could take the strain.

  
still feeling inhuman and too much like a weapon left in the minute gaps between another man and the wall of a foxhole for comfort, bucky pulls himself up, allowing himself to become a puppet whose strings are manipulated by him (and not zola, and not the goddamned military) until he’s dressed and his teeth are brushed. he has no memory of doing either of those things, but he can pretend that his brain is still healing instead of facing the harsh reality that is a stunted ability to create and store short term memory as a consequence of being practically lobotomised one too many times. he pulls on and laces his combat boots because the familiar weight and pull on his feet as he walks is comforting. the mere thought of the man who’d become his sweetheart in the oddest of circumstances isn’t enough to fix him completely, and bucky’s learned to not hate himself for that.

  
he wonders what steve would do if he could see inside the partially stagnated river that is _bucky._ it’s second nature to pretend like he’s coping with the strings of bodies of human beings and fallen countries trailed behind him but he’s never once felt like he’s been allowed to truly _exist_ around him without some sort of ancient filter that he could have found in a photo booth way back when.

rogers would probably draw, is what he would do. if he had an ounce of sense and was even a fraction less of a pushover when it came to whatever he could salvage of _before_ , the drawing would be titled: _bucky, putting on his human shell, 2019._

  
he’s brushing his hair, now, and putting in all the products that he puts in every morning so that his hair can be shiny and pretty and everything that bucky himself very much isn’t. he thinks of steve just once more, letting one head of all american blond hair and two handfuls of decidedly broken promises soak through his brain before distracting himself again. no use wondering what could have been, and all that. their friendship is still one of things he treasures most in the world, but no amount of wishing could make it anything like before, and that’s _okay_ because both of them have changed beyond recognition.

  
(if he tells himself that enough, it almost starts to hurt less.)

  
the smell of peaches wafts through the bathroom because he’d specifically chosen this particular brand of goop on his hands that he’s massaging into his scalp after tony had said he liked it. he herds all of his stray thoughts back to his heart, where they belong. his mind is scattering today. he’d better keep an eye on that.

  
washing his slippery hands, bucky reaches out to grab all the stray threads that usually escape him after he’s spent all night asleep. he becomes just enough of a human being to let himself go down to the communal kitchen, confident in his ability to not spontaneously spring into attack the second he encounters anything he doesn’t fully expect.

  
(on the days where he still feels like something is _missing_ even after he’s pulled back all the threads he could, he drinks coffee in his own kitchen and retreats back to his bedroom.)

  
he whistles a tune under his breath as he climbs down the staircase between him and the rest of the avengers (minus clint. he’d gone to the west coast to see his family the last friday, and he usually spends a couple weeks with them before coming back.) it’s something modern that he can’t actually remember the name of but that he knows he likes. he’s not too worried about not being able to remember. he’ll either get the name back from the recesses of his fried brain later in the morning or he’ll look it up on his phone in the afternoon.

  
when he finally reaches the kitchen, bucky’s eyes dart around, still frantic enough to scope out potential threats, before he fully registers who’s there with him.

  
natasha is perched on top of a table, sat with her legs crossed and posture loose enough to hunch over and around the cup of tea held in both of her hands. she looks deep in thought, but bucky knows that she’s probably thinking about which of her plants need watering and which are fine for now instead of the nonstop inventory of weapons that most of the team probably assumes she’s taking. he understands the need to nurture something, to know that at least a couple tangible beings are alive because of you.

  
sat at the table is steve. he’s facing natasha’s back (which is an incredible show of trust from someone who supposedly thinks that love is for children) and reading the morning’s newspaper. bucky guesses that it’s just something to do while the rest of the world wakes up, but he hasn’t asked. he’s trying to let steve have little things to keep to himself and not have to put into words for anyone else. bucky knew that he’d gotten a kick out of discovering the horoscope column was still a thing; his ma thought that they’d get booed out of the “real papers” in the early thirties, only a couple years after they’d been put in.

  
it’s still decently early in the morning on a weekend, so sam isn’t awake. he prefers to have his runs in the afternoons when he doesn’t have to wake up for anything in the morning. if it was a weekday, he’d just be bursting through the elevator doors, covered in sweat and trailing breathlessly after a glowing steve. bucky would tease them both, and all would be right in the world.

  
tony was in his room, actually _sleeping_ for once in his forsaken life (he knew this because he’d asked friday before he left for the kitchen). that meant that bruce had left. whenever he visited from whichever far off land that had taken his fancy this time around, both of them would stay up and talk and do science that made bucky’s head spin, even though he’d now finished what was equivalent to a full modern high school qualification in science, and had now moved on to first year college chemistry.

  
slotting himself into place among the well-oiled gears that is the communal kitchen under the light of a barely rising sun, bucky boils the kettle, planning to make two mugs of coffee, because he knows that tony will wake up at the damn scent of it anyway, even though his bedroom is two floors down. he may be a super soldier, but tony’s ability to sniff out a cup of coffee is still astonishing and vaguely unnerving. he knows he doesn’t need to speak, and is grateful for it. steve and natasha occupy their own spaces while bucky occupies his, close enough to them to be in their company but without the stilted silences that came with needing conversation to fill the gaps where trust and legitimate friendship hadn’t grown yet.

  
three small beeps signalled that the kettle had boiled, and bucky quickly poured the boiling water into two mugs before stirring in the instant coffee grounds that he’d developed an odd fascination with for a few weeks after he’d started living at the tower. sending a slight nod in his team mate’s direction, he carries both cups of coffee down another few flights of stairs until he reaches tony’s floor. they still don’t sleep in the same room or even the same _floor_ because tony isn't ready to handle that along with all of the things it means. bucky, who’d always been a _dive in neck deep and face the consequences when they come_ type of guy, hadn’t understood that at first, but he’d be damned if he’d be to anyone what the entire world had been to him at one point: a pressuring force that only seemed to grow bigger and heavier every day until it was all he could do to not lash out violently and spectacularly.

  
he doesn’t know exactly how, but every time he brings coffee to tony in the mornings (usually at least once every week, or just whenever he felt like sleeping in his bed) he gets tunnel vision that fuzzes white around the edges until he lays his eyes on tony, wrapped in his bedsheets and looking like the slightly less sleep deprived version of the angel he always is. the cavity in his chest that looms too near to bucky’s left shoulder seems to fill in a little, lessening the ache of everyday life until it becomes just bearable enough to breathe and feel like he wasn’t wasting air by doing it.

  
he could see himself bringing tony coffee to ease him out of his sleep every week, once a week, for the rest of both of their lives.

  
bucky barnes feels a little more human now, and he’s still not there all the way, but that’s okay as long as he can be not-there-all-the-way with tony by his side.  
“mornin’ fudgesicle,” tony croaks, his voice sounding vaguely like a purr because those are the first words he’s spoken since before he and bruce lapsed into the nonverbal comfort of tinkering in the same lab but on different projects. he hasn’t even opened his eyes yet, opting instead to grope around blindly for the mug of coffee he knows that bucky made for him. the other man laughs, muttering something under his breath before guiding tony’s hand to it. he waits until he’s taken his first sip before cracking his eyes open.

  
bucky’s sat above him, and tony doesn’t know if he knows it or not, but he’s positioned in such a way that the rising sun is behind his head, making it look like there’s a halo around him. bucky’s smiling softly, and it takes tony a second to realise that he is, too.  


whatever this is, whatever tony can commit to without freaking out and pushing bucky away, is bliss. bucky’s woken tony up like this maybe fifty times now, and every single time still feels like the first.

  
“instant coffee grounds? bucky babe, we have a french press in the kitchen, and you know this,” tony wheedles in as whiny a tone as he can manage without giving himself a headache. bucky’s smile falters slightly, and he pats tony on the chest gently.

  
“i- i forgot it was there. i hope you like this one,” bucky says slowly, avoiding eye contact with tony the whole time.

  
“nah, ‘s okay. you only use it when you’re making coffee for me, i guess. there are more important things to remember. if you ever bring me decaf coffee, though, we’ll have a problem,” tony replies, drawling the last sentence in that voice he only uses when he’s messing with someone, laying the tone on thickly because he knows that bucky can’t really tell when people are being sarcastic anymore.

  
the other man gives another huff of laughter before wrapping his arm around tony. they sit for a while, watching the sun rise until the sky is all the way blue.

 

**Author's Note:**

> as always, leave a kudos and/or comment if u liked this fic and wanted to let me know!! you can also find me on tumblr (@fuckmarvel).  
> have an amazing day/afternoon/evening!!


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